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Printing is evil. Back in the day this evilness sparked even Richard Stallman’s ire and so the Free Software Movement was born. It was 1980 and the new Xerox 9700 laser printer’s proprietary software could not be modified to add an email notification feature.

Fast forward 33 years. The HP Laserjet P1102 has a proprietary driver plugin. It’s freely available for the hp-setup program on Linux. Except, that HP does not compile it for the armv6 architecture. So my home print server, a Raspberry Pi, did not work with my new shiny P1102.

Morale of the story: free software has nothing to do with communism. On the contrary: it promotes private property rights. The communist, a.k.a. thief, is HP. I bought their printer with my own money, but the tricky bastards did not allow me to use it. A classic case of “redistribution of wealth”. It was Rick’s opens source driver that saved my day.

My long awaited Raspberry Pi has arrived about 2 weeks ago. I’ve ordered some accessories along with it, like an SD card, a HDMI cable and a power supply. What was missing though, was any kind of input device. I flashed the Raspbian image to the SD, hooked it to the TV and go.

It booted! And then waited hopelessly for me to log in.

Fortunately my flat has built-in Ethernet everywhere, so I connected the Pi, and tried to ssh into it from an Ubuntu laptop. Success! I typed “startx” and an orphaned LXDE session popped up on the TV. Rather useless without a mouse.

But then I remembered the so called X-server, which has to be the largest program that does nothing for you according to Ken Thompson. Except that it does. Unix GUI programs don’t talk to the screen/keyboard/mouse directly, but through an X-server that handles these. And my Ubuntu had one already running. And the GUI-X communication can run over a network as well. So…

and what popped up was the proof for the superiority of this weird, unfriendly, minimalistic thing called Unix:

Ubuntu & Raspberry on same screen

Ladies and gentlemen: 2 full desktop environments running on 1 screen! And that was it for the first weekend with the Pi.

For the second weekend, I bought some more accessories: Logitech K400 wireless keyboard with built-in touchpad, 1 TB USB hard-disk and a powered USB-hub. Time to build my low-power home server. Built into the hidden recesses of my desk.

Home server

Then I turned my USB printer into a network-printer installing CUPS on the Raspberry. The last adventure so far was setting up an FTP-server on said fruit. Vsftpd. VS probably means very secure, which usually stands for totally unusable. And yes, it was a bloody nightmare to set up. At the end it turned out you have to comment out nearly all lines in the bloody /etc/pam.d/vsftpd file. Oh well.